Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     In ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’ William Carlos Williams suggests, “people die for the lack of what is found in poetry”. This credits the poem with more power than current irony allows, but I am sure it is a sentiment that Robert Bly subscribes to. Throughout his long career he has seen poetry as a means to unlock both our private lives and the life of the community – “bringing the soul up close to the thing the poet is contemplating”, as he puts it in his introduction to The Best American Poetry 1999.

     Bly is probably best known in Britain for his book Iron John. Personally I have never understood the controversy generated by this study of masculine consciousness. Bly is simply observing that men often possess grief – in particular due to a lack of meaningful communication with their fathers as they are growing up – which rather than face they project onto the world as anger, or onto women as an idealized romanticism. Although Bly’s prose style can be overly rhetorical sometimes, I think he has something important to say. But the predominant response in Britain remains one of condescension and ridicule.

     Thus in his recent review of Best American Poetry 1999 in P.N. Review, David C. Ward talks in terms of Bly’s “activism as a guru or shaman for the so-called ‘men’s movement’”.Why “so-called”? It’s noticeable that the two poets that Ward singles out for praise from Bly’s anthology are both long-time feminists, Carolyn Kizer and Adrienne Rich. Good though their poems are (particularly Rich’s study of sexual awakening during the 1950s – “the loneliest of lonely American decades”) I can’t help wondering if this isn’t a case of Ward trying to curry women’s favour. I think he gives the game away when he writes in reference to the metaphor of “heat” in Bly’s Introduction, “one man’s heat is another woman’s damp squib”. That’s as maybe, but it reads like political correctness to me. As a man, who is Ward to put words in women’s mouths – surely they can speak for themselves? Actually Bly’s selection shows as much. Despite Ward’s digs at all the “dad poems” and male poets confessing how they “act like doofuses”, what comes through are the number of steely poems by women that Bly has chosen. (Molly Peacock’s fine ‘Say You Love Me’ in which a drunken father forces his daughter to express her affection being one striking example.)

     None of this would matter if it didn’t compound the denial of
feelings that Bly has tried to articulate. An editorial in a recent
Observer (19 March 2000) is headlined, “Can Men Read?”. It refers to a survey that discovered men are supposedly narrow-minded when it comes to choosing books – amongst other things put off by “love” in the title. The Observer continues by pointing out that women are increasingly at ease with football and other “blokeish” pursuits, only to end: “the surprise is not what men are reading, but that they do it at all”. We give a wry smile. But at what price? It perpetuates the very thing it professes to be critiquing: men are unfeeling, inarticulate oafs.

     I must admit I have a more sinister take on these things. I think
both men and women are meeting in some bland middle-ground, a largely depthless surface where immediate sensation is all. Bly makes this point in his introduction:

It’s as if some world-wide force were trying to free us from all literary style, and is succeeding. Many contemporary writers persuade themselves it is good not to have inwardness, not to have intensity, not to engage layers of meaning.

The Sufis talk in terms of the nafs, the animal consciousness within us, waiting to reassert itself once we stop doing the civilizing work that contains it. Buddhism puts it even more starkly: the world is driven by greed, hatred and delusion unless we make a conscious effort for it to be otherwise. I value Robert Bly because he’s never been afraid to highlight such ideas in both his poetry and prose. And – it being time to reveal an interest – this is why I choose to publish him. Like William Carlos Williams he sees the poet’s task as crucial. Playful certainly, but always with serious intent.

     Is this reflected in Best American Poetry 1999? I think so, and for this reason Bly’s is a worthy addition to the Best of series. I would cite David Ignatow’s prose poem ‘The Story of Progress’ charting a boy’s movement into a world beyond self. Or a feisty memory of saxophonist Sidney Bechet by Hayden Carruth. And Louise Gluck’s shimmering ‘Vita Nova’:

I remember sounds like that from my childhood,
laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful...

My criticism is not so much with the book but the current state of
American poetry itself. All those creative writing programs have
generated a poetry industry that spews words out. Most of the poets
gathered here (the book has useful biographical notes and short reflections on the poems) teach writing at some institution or another. Technical skill abounds in American poetry, all is revealed (the poem as analyst’s couch), but not much stays to haunt you after the reading. To his credit Bly steers clear of such dross and has selected more than a fair share of memorable writing. And at least one work – Richard Wilbur’s ‘This Pleasing Anxious Being’ – is a magnificent poem, that alone makes the anthology worth shipping across the Atlantic. Here’s the opening of the last section:

Wild, lashing snow, which thumps against the windshield 
Like earth tossed down upon a coffin lid,
Half-clogs the wipers, and our Buick yaws
On the black roads of 1928.
Father is driving; Mother, leaning out,
Tracks with her flashlight beam the pavement’s edge,
And we must weather hours more of storm
To be in Baltimore for Christmastime.

That “yaw” is absolutely right, anticipating in its sound both “father” and “mother” who negotiate – as parents must – the “black roads” ahead. This is good writing by any year’s standards. A lifeline thrown out to us as we turn from the storms of the last century to the who-knows-what of the next.